For the Love of Home Keyboards

Although we mostly discuss "grown up" keyboards here, I'd be willing to be more than a few of us cut our teeth on one of the hundreds of "home keyboards" that flooded the market in the 80's.  Mine was a Casio PT-20.  The drum beats were cheesy, it had an auto-chord function, it only played one note at a time, and the handful of preset sounds it could make sounded nothing like the instruments they were supposed to imitate.  But at the impressionable age of 11, it helped foster the love of making music that would one day become my career.  I had a couple songbooks full of schmaltzy songs from the seventies and I programmed them meticulously into the tiny step sequencer it had.  I learned to figure out melodies by ear.  I learned to understand song structure.  I learned how minor chords and major chords differed.  Many years later when I got my first proper synth (a Korg Poly-800), the PT-20 understandably got shelved.  It may not have been the latest or the greatest, but it was enough to inspire me to learn, and for that, I'll always be thankful.